Tuesday, June 19, 2012

Classroom Seating Arrangement

Good morning! :)

One of the most important things to me is how you arrange your classroom. I always think about a few things when considering how to arrange my classroom...

-Can my students all see the SMARTboard from their desks without having to turn around?
-Can my students access all of our classroom materials without having to move something?
-Can my students scoot out their chair without bumping into a desk or another chair?
-Can I move around the classroom with ease? (Without having to squeeze through desks?)
-Can I see ALL of my students from my desk?
-Can I see ALL of my students from the meeting table?

Sometimes I have to arrange the room, and then tweak it a little to make sure all of the above questions are answered YES.

I've had my desks arranged in many different ways during the years. However, my favorite arrangement was when I had tables. I would take tables any day over desks! Tables facilitate cooperative group work and give the students so much more work space. However, tables are not always available to you. So, in that case, I would arrange my desks like tables.

When I taught specials classes and had mostly small groups of kids at one time (between 6-10 kids most of the day), I had my classroom set up with my meeting table in the middle. I liked it being in the center of the class. It was more like the central meeting place instead of stuck in a corner. This is what my room looked like:

If you want to see some examples of my classroom seating arrangement, you can see one of my previous posts about how to set up your classroom.

I love several of these arrangements... especially the one in the middle on the right. Except I would probably face my student's desks towards the SMARTboard and not my desk. I don't teach from my desk, therefore I wouldn't want their desks to be pointing toward mine :). Check out the link to the PDF above for lots of great information (and bigger pictures).

I also found this awesome site: Classroom Desk Arrangement. You can choose your class size, then it has several different arrangements you can choose from. It looks pretty cool... here is a screen shot of the welcome page:

Scholastic also has a pretty cool Classroom Set-Up tool. It allows you to create your classroom layout and has all of the shapes already made. You just "draw" it on the screen... pretty cool! The only thing I don't like is that you can't turn any of the desks at an angle.

I kind of do my own version of this each year by drawing my classroom on a Microsoft Word document. This way I can save it, re-arrange it and re-use it all year long.

The last website I will tell you about is Classroom Architect. It is a pretty neat website. It lets you choose your room's dimensions, and then lets you drop and drag all of the furniture into the classroom. It is pretty easy to use and looks nice when finished. Here is a screenshot of what it looks like:

Below is a link to a basic classroom seating chart that I created on PowerPoint. If you don't have PowerPoint but have a Google Account and access to Google Docs, you should be able to manipulate it there as well. Save the file, then re-arrange the desks and furniture by just clicking and dragging! :) Grab the green dot at the top of each item. This will allow you to rotate the item you've chosen. Delete items not needed and save your new template! :)

UPDATE: 9/13/17I've created more versions of the seating chart below that are still fully editable, and have put them on my Teachers Pay Teachers Site. Please click the link below for the FREE download!